increased productivity
I like to think that I’m pretty good with time & productivity. I’ve read a bunch of books on time management, I make daily lists of tasks and set goals, most days I work around 14 hours… but at the end of the month, although I produce more results than the average bear, it still doesn’t quite add up to the sum of my efforts.
When the reality doesn’t match the perception, something needs to be checked! It’s human nature to fool ourselves and make excuses, so I like to use these kinds of cues to evaluate how I can improve my action (or at least the way I view things).
For this particular situation, I figured that I needed to improve my methods in order to be even more productive. It would have been easy for me to continue comparing myself to others and resting on my laurels, but comfort zones are the devil! Repeat, COMFORT ZONES ARE THE DEVIL!!
So shortly after I had this realisation last month, I noticed something from James Schramko that spoke about some guys that had setup the SEO BrainTrust. I’m always keen to listen to what others are doing in the SEO world so I couldn’t resist opting-in to their site and watching the promo videos. Long story short, after listening to Dan Thies for a while he started talking about maximising results by “chunking” your day. This got my attention because I’d recently started to comparmentalise my work day into focussed chunks instead of my usual style of manic multitasking.
Then Eben Pagan sent me an email this week for his wake up productive blog and in one of his videos he started to talk about chunking also.
Hmmm, I think the universe is trying to tell me something.
Eban also spoke about the pillars (which I’m learning about in his guru course) and how I should be spending 40% of my time on customer generation, 20% on conversion tactics and then 10% on content. Damn, this is where I’ve been going wrong as traditionally I will spend around 80% of my work week or more on content. Being a web designer, it’s second nature for me to sit down and smash a heap of websites to pass the time. I’ve incorporated SEO tactics into my development cycle, so that was my contribution to traffic generation. But now I see how I had everything ass backwards! This is why I’m able to punch out a bunch of websites and info products each month, but the financial returns don’t match my efforts. This is why I’ve been making small incremental improvements to my turnover but no leaps and bounds.
Houston, we have an ‘ah ha’ moment!
So today was officially the first day of my new routine. I spent the first 4 hours on traffic generation, then 2 hours on coversion tactics, now I’m going to work on content. I’ll post the results at the end of the month and report how the stats and revenues have improved.
CONCLUSION: Do one type of task at a time and prioritise the allocation of time to each task.
ps. turn off your email client and just check it first thing in the morning and then once more towards the end of the day. This eliminates the largest contributor of distractions and allows you to work without interuptions. Trust me, the world wont end if you’re not checking your inbox every 20 minutes!
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